Introducing The Brand Substack Directory

A living catalog of 25 brands publishing on Substack, with subscriber counts and an editorial read on each.

Somewhere around February 2025, I noticed the brands I follow starting to show up on Substack. Rachel Karten called it early in Link in Bio. First The RealReal. Then Tory Burch, Loftie, Rare Beauty, Nanit. A year later, there’s a real wave, and I wanted to start tracking it.

So I built the thing I wanted to exist.

It’s a catalog of the brands currently publishing on Substack, split into two categories.

Brand-owned publications, where the company is the byline. M.M.LaFleur’s The M Dash. Tory Burch’s What Should I Wear? Saie, Rare Beauty, Nanit, Loftie, Hinge, Blackbird, and more.

Founder-led newsletters, where a named individual is writing, but the newsletter also functions as a brand channel because the founder is the brand’s public voice. Melanie Masarin at Ghia. Dianna Cohen at Crown Affair. Clare Vivier.

Each entry has the baseline info you’d want (category, launch date, subscriber size where I could verify it etc.) and the ones I’ve spent the most time with get a short On Brand read: what’s working, what’s not, what’s worth watching.

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If you run a brand, this is for you

The question isn’t whether to be on Substack. It’s whether you have the bandwidth to do it well. Saie hired a full-time Substack editor. Blackbird is running what’s effectively a trade magazine. Nanit is interviewing cartoonist dads about parenting, not selling monitors.

The brands doing this badly are the ones that treat Substack like a newer channel for the same content. It doesn’t land. The platform’s content guidelines literally say it’s not for conventional email marketing, and readers can tell the difference.

The brands doing it well are asking a different question: what’s the cultural conversation adjacent to our product that we could actually own? Loftie isn’t writing about alarm clocks. It’s writing about the history of sleep.

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What’s next

Part two of the directory drops next month: the brand sponsorship tracker. That’s the bigger, messier story. Which brands are embedding themselves in independent creator newsletters, and what that activity actually looks like in real time. More on that soon.

Until then: bookmark the directory. I’ll be updating it quarterly. Next refresh in July.

Spot a brand I missed? Please reply to this email and let me know! Credit always given.

Alex

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